Jung’s Personal Confession

ABSTRACT

C. G. Jung’s “Psychology of the Transference” (1946/1954, CW 16) describes his template for healing in psychoanalysis. He selected a series of ten erotic alchemical woodcuts from the Rosarium Philosophorum. The author contends these drawings were chosen because of Jung’s emotional, deep, and healing relationships with three women who had previously been his patients: Sabina Spielrein, Maria Moltzer, and Toni Wolff. The author describes how she uses these drawings in her work. She then explores Jung’s relationships with these women and examines how his 1925 essay “Marriage as a Psychological Relationship” (1925/1954, CW 17) depicts Jung’s marriage to his wife, Emma.

KEY WORDS:

• alchemy
• archetypal images
• boundaries, C. G. Jung
• Emma Jung
• love
• Maria Moltzer
• marriage
• personal confession
• Rosarium drawings
• Sabina Spielrein
• spiritual wife
• Toni Wolff

NOTE

References to The Collected Works of C. G. Jung are cited in the text as CW, volume number, and paragraph number. The Collected Works are published in English by Routledge (UK) and Princeton University Press (USA).

Notes

1. “In the opus alchymicum the erotic, sexual and incestuous features of the relationship between the king and the queen (or the sun and the moon) are outstanding characteristics which are only thinly veiled by the allegorical language of the adepts. In the transference, the erotic, sexual and incestuous elements never escape the attention of the analyst” (Fabricius 1994, 32).

2. Jung also discussed the incest impulse as a wish for the return to childhood, a symbol of spiritual rebirth (1912/1953, CW 7). When the innate drive for wholeness appears, “it begins by disguising itself under the symbolism of incest” (1946/1954, CW 16, ¶471). “Jung’s conception of incest is that of a symbol, revealing both the need to move on from mother, father and the family circle (the Incest taboo) and, at the same time, the opposite, the need to regress (the incest impulse)” (Samuels 1985, 166–167).

3. Katherine Olivetti, personal communication, February 2020.

4. Ibid.

5. Jung to Freud, October 1907, “My veneration of you is … the character of a ‘religious’ crush. I still feel it is disgusting and ridiculous because of its undeniable erotic overtone. This abominable feeling comes from the fact that as a boy I was the victim of a sexual assault by a man I once worshipped” (McGuire, 1974, 95). John Beebe believes this occurred at about age eighteen, when he was seduced by a friend of his father’s, a man of the cloth and then a spiritual mentor to Jung (personal communication). After Jung’s confession to Freud, Freud was dismissive, joked, focused on a different part of Jung’s letter, and did not mention the confession at all. An empathic failure! (Gasker 1999, 87).

6. The Jungian analyst Jane Wheelwright (1905–2004) told John that “someone came into a session with Jung either having heard or dreamed about Jung and Toni Wolff. Jung immediately told the person, ‘I hope you are not seeing this as any kind of role model!’” (John Beebe, personal communication, October 28, 2018).

7. “Clinical events such as dialogue, inquiry, interaction, examples of patient and/or analyst vulnerability, impasse, enactment, therapeutic failures, deepening of work, phenomena such as we read in clinical writing today, did not manifest in Jung’s writing. Throughout my reading, it became clear that we have been left with only incomplete retellings or records of Jung’s work. We have little sense of the quality of his practice. We do not get a sense of the patient’s progress as his or her life unfolded, and often we have no idea about the outcome of treatment” (Cohen 2015, 37). The eight examples of Jung as relational are in the Appendix of the article (47–50).

8. Olivetti, personal communication, February 2020.

9. The Roelli typescript is part of the Protocols, now housed at the Library of Congress. See C. G. Jung, R. F. C Hull, and Aniela Jaffé, C.G. Jung Papers, Manuscript/Mixed Material, https://lccn.loc.gov/mm95083473.

10. Ibid.

11. Ibid., Protocols, 34.

12. See also “Toni Wolff: Women around Carl Jung,” Jung Currents, http://jungcurrents.com/women-and-carl-jung-toni-wolff.

13. The year Jung wrote “Marriage as a Psychological Relationship,” he was barely home, and when he was, he saw Toni at least two days and one night a week. From December 13, 1924, to early spring 1925, he was with the Pueblo Indians in Taos. He lectured once a week in Zürich from March 23 to July 6. From mid-July to mid-August, he gave twelve lectures on dream analysis in Dorset, England, accompanied by both Toni and Emma. He spent the rest of the summer preparing for his trip to Africa, and left October 15, returning in the early spring 1926. Maybe he was home a total of five months from December 1924 until Spring 1926.

14. John Beebe, personal communication, June 23, 2020.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Betsy Cohen

Betsy Cohen, LCSW, PhD, analyst member and faculty at the C. G. Jung Institute of San Francisco, is the author of The Snow White Syndrome: All about Envy (MacMillan, 1987). She has appeared on 120 TV and radio shows, including Oprah! She’s also published several articles in Jung Journal: Culture & Psyche: “The Intimate Self-Disclosure,” “Emmanuel Levinas and Depth Psychotherapy,” “Jung’s Answer to Jews,” “Dr. Jung and his Patients,” “The Flexible Frame: Holding the Patient in Mind,” and, most recently, “The Skinless Analyst: Mutual Transparency in Psychoanalysis.” Her paper “Tangled Up in Blue: A Revision of Complex Theory” appears in Why and How We (Still) Read Jung, edited by Jean Kirsch and Murray Stein (Routledge, 2013). She is currently exploring how ancient wisdom, particularly the erotic dialogues of Plato and the Song of Songs, can be incorporated into contemporary relational Jungian psychotherapy. Correspondence: [email protected].